The Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife has sentenced a businessman from Tenerife who owns a betting house to pay a fine of 2,700 euros for being considered the author of a crime simulation and more specifically for report to the Civil Guard a alleged theft in order to hide an alleged embezzlement in business accounts.
However, the businessman remains acquitted by the Court of the accusation of fraud for which the Prosecutor’s Office requested a sentence of 5 years in prison and the payment of 92,000 euros.
The judgment indicates that the defendant signed a contract at the end of 2016 with an entity dedicated to sports betting to jointly operate a premises located in the south of tenerife so that he would give this company 50 percent of his profits.
The businessman was in charge of processing, accepting and collecting the bets, proceeding with the payment of the prizes and taking charge of the accounting.
After the trial, the Court considers it proven that between the end of January and the beginning of February 2017the defendant placed a large number of bets in his favor through the window system that totaled 92,080 euros without disbursing any amount.
The processed he was aware that the box he managed was fictitious due to the non-existence of cash for which he collected the winning tickets in three other establishments. But in reality he only got hold of 12,146 euros, which is attributed to a material lack of time and not wanting to arouse suspicion.
The entity with which he signed the agreement agreed at that time to give him almost 3,200 euros as replacement, an amount that the defendant did not reflect in the accounting.
For this reason, when the time to carry out the monthly liquidation of operations approached, he simulated a robbery to hide this fraudulent situation and for this purpose he filed a complaint with the Civil Guard of Adeje on February 6 for an alleged robbery with force in the place that he ran.
To give this fiction more credibility, around two in the morning, he made a call to 112 from a booth in which he stated that he was observing that there were several people inside the premises.
A police patrol He appeared at the scene and the agents verified that the establishment was closed and no incident was perceived. Hours later it was when the defendant denounced the theft of almost 97,000 euros that were in the safe, register and betting machines that had been destroyed by the defendant himself to try to give credibility to his words, according to the sentence.
During the legal proceedings it was found that “unusual circumstances” occurred on those dates, such as unusual figures and the registration of multiple bets of 300 euros issued at intervals of between 15 and 90 seconds.
The defendant’s words during the trial have been described as “lacking a minimum of consistency”, like those of a witness who assured that he had made some of these plays and that he also used to do so successively. However, the Court rules out that the assumptions to be able to conclude that a fraud occurred, as maintained by the private prosecution and the Prosecutor’s Office.
The same does not occur with the charge of felony simulation inasmuch as the alleged robbery and the complaint were “consciously concocted and executed with the intention of disguising the embezzlement made in the cash register of the betting shop.”
The witnesses confirmed that they found the way the betting machine was broken suspicious or that the security alarm did not detect the entry of any person.
